I remember when I was 14 and my parents came to pick me up from overnight camp. My counselor had to physically pry me apart from my new best friends. That’s what I felt like leaving the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop on Sunday.

The three-day writing seminar brought together 27 advanced children’s writers from Austin. We assembled at the home of YA authors Cynthia and Greg Leitich-Smith to build community and critique manuscripts.

Cyn did a masterful job leading 40-minute critique sessions. The first portion of each critique was devoted to helping the writer understand what he or she did well. As our fearless leader rightfully pointed out, this is often as useful to a writer as hearing areas for improvement. I couldn’t agree more!

It was clear from the level of discussion that everyone in attendance had spent hours poring over each manuscript, analyzing it, and writing up helpful suggestions to help the writer revise. I especially loved the end of each session when Cyn shared her gems related to the particular genre we had just explored. And she often suggested useful exercises such as rewriting a scene from the point-of-view of the antagonist to help us understand our characters better, or rewriting a chapter using only dialogue to help discover what’s essential and what can be cut.

In addition to all that we learned about writing, I think everyone came away with an intense sense of community. I’ve never been on a football team, but I imagine this is the bond I’d feel with my buddies after my team won the State Championship. Given the fact that writing is often a solitary sport, the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop was really something to cheer about!

Tags: Austin writers, Cynthia Leitich-Smith, Greg Leitch-Smith

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Shana's Posts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.